October Vagabonds eBook

“I can repeat to thee many a counsel of them
of old, if thou shrink not back nor weary to learn
of lowly cares. Above all must the threshing-floor
be levelled with the ponderous roller, and wrought
by hand and cemented with clinging potter’s
clay, that it may not gather weeds nor crack in the
reign of dust, and be playground withal for manifold
destroyers. Often the tiny mouse builds his house
and makes his granaries underground, or the eyeless
mole scoops his cell; and in chinks is found the toad,
and all the swarming vermin that are bred in earth;
and the weevil, and the ant that fears a destitute
old age, plunder the great pile of spelt.”

Perhaps some reader had been disposed hastily to say:
“What did you want with hooks out of doors?
Was not Nature enough?” No one who loves both
books and Nature would ask that question, or need to
have explained why a knapsack library is a necessary
adjunct of a walking-tour.

For Nature and books react so intimately on each other,
and, far more than one realizes without thought, our
enjoyment of Nature is a creation of literature.
For example, can any one sensitive to such considerations
deny that the meadows of the world are greener for
the Twenty-third Psalm, or the starry sky the gainer
in our imagination by the solemn cadences of the book
of Job? All our experiences, new and personal
as they may seem to us, owe incalculably their depth
and thrill to the ancestral sentiment in our blood,
and joy and sorrow are for us what they are, no little
because so many old, far-away generations of men and
women have joyed and sorrowed in the same way before
us. Literature but represents that concentrated
sentiment, and satisfies through expression our human
need for some sympathetic participation with us in
our human experience.

That a long-dead poet walking in the Spring was moved
as I am by the unfolding leaf and the returning bird
imparts an added significance to my own feelings;
and that some wise and beautiful old book knew and
said it all long ago, makes my life seem all the more
mysteriously romantic for me to-day. Besides,
books are not only such good companions for what they
say, but for what they are. As with any other
friend, you may go a whole day with them, and not
have a word to say to each other, yet be happily conscious
of a perfect companionship. The book we know and
love—­and, of course, one would never risk
taking a book we didn’t know for a companion—­has
long since become a symbol for us, a symbol of certain
moods and ways of feeling, a key to certain kingdoms
of the spirit, of which it is often sufficient just
to hold the key in our hands. So, a single flower
in the hand is a key to Summer, a floating perfume
the key to the hidden gardens of remembrance.
The wrong book in the hand, whether opened or not,
is as distracting a presence as an irrelevant person;
and therefore it was with great care that I chose
my knapsack library. It consisted of these nine
books: